Levelling: [was Re: [Leica] More snaps (Skopar)]

[tedgrant at shaw.ca (Ted Grant)]

Peter Klein said:
> How did we live without Photoshop?  Well we put graph paper on the 
> enlarger easel, and then rotated it for the horizon.  We also tipped the 
> easel up by various corners until the building verticals were straight. 
> For small corrections a pile of pennies under the easel corners worked 
> nicely.  And if you tipped the easel up much, you had to dodge down the 
> print as you exposed it.
>
> Or, you just photographed mostly people and tried not to worry about it 
> too much.  Straight horizons and parallel verticals are bourgeois 
> concepts.  :-)
>
> Shh, Ted, don't tell Sandy I said that!<<<<<<,

Hi Peter,
I generally have good luck or paid more attention to verticals and 
horizontals throughout my career, that doesn't mean I was always correct 
every photograph. I did a considerable amount of shooting "houses for sale" 
ads in the early days when we did this between news assignments for the 
daily newspaper. So that sort of made one more attentive of the lines up and 
down.

But you're right when we're shooting people, we're far more into the people 
action and re-action than whether the horizontal and vertical lines are 
crack on. :-) Therefore we tend to make errors at these times.

But Sandy and I are great at snapping at each other about things like 
horizons and verticals which I don't have any doubt helps each of us to pay 
more attention to these things when we're shooting.

ted